"When the dancefloor squeaks, out come the geeks"

It's not hard to understand why Michael Zilkha & Michel Esteban¹s ZE Records and the whole punk-funk, disco-not-disco thang of the early 80s has been rediscovered by a new generation looking for their own answers to music's eternal mind-body problem. ZE offered a seductive vision of the world where style collided with substance, where deconstruction made a reconcilliation with melody and hooks, where groove embraced distortion, where punk's outcast geek was transformed by the fairy godmother of disco into a "Halston, Gucci... Fiorucci" clad suavecito with a social conscience and a brain..

If this moment in dance music history can be seen as the revenge of the nerd, the class valedictorians were undoubtedly Was (Not Was). The group was formed in 1980 by two childhood friends (Donald Fagenson and David Weiss) from Detroit who had spent their adolescence locked in each other's basements listening to The MC5, Frank Zappa, John Coltrane and Firesign Theatre. Such listening habits...

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